Good evening everyone,

First time poster here and have an interest in repainting aircraft. I would like know what kind of software/programs you use. I travel for a living (not so much now unfortunately) but wanted to know if you can do this type of work on a tablet, more specifically a Microsoft tablet. I have a MacBook pro but I am pretty sure that wont cut it since its apple. Any info/advice is greatly appreciated!

 

Kind Regards,

 

Ryan E.

 

For the little I have done I've used Gimp. Available at https://www.gimp.org/. It's free and from what i've heard it's as good as photoshop.

Ryan,

I've been painting for about 15 years, not so much now as I don't have the time. I started out watching any and all video tutorials on youtube on the subject. I have used most versions of Photoshop but now find AffinityPhoto as my preferred software, does everything PS does and you buy it not rent it like PS, offers great support and regularly updated. It costs about $50, last time I looked.The easiest aircraft paintkits I've found are PMDG, Qualitywings, Majestic Q400, the hardest are Aerosoft and Carenado as they don't come with full length fuselage sides which makes it easier to cut and paste to each part of the aircraft sides. You'll need to have a good understanding of the various graphics formats like DDS,DXT,BMP, JPEG and how to convert between them and using Layers, as well as orientating each part in the painkit to the actual finished product which can get complicated. Alpha channels come into play for night time and metalic textures and shines . A good starting point is to paint textures for AI aircraft, they offer a much simpler paintkit, give you a good working knowledge of software and how to work back  to front from paintkit to finished product and what you need to do to get to that point.

Hope this helps,

Steve

Welcome to the AVSIM forums!   Normally I would have left your post in the New Members forum, but for learning about repainting aircraft, I thought this is a better forum and you may get a lot more responses from the guys who are experts.

12 hours ago, Scorp said:

For the little I have done I've used Gimp. Available at https://www.gimp.org/. It's free and from what i've heard it's as good as photoshop.

Thanks, I will take a look into it and keep doing my research.

Steve,

 

Thank you very much for all the insight! Those were actually the three that I was interested in painting. Ill definitely start with AI to accustomed to it. Since I have a MacBook pro and travel for a living would you recommend using a windows program for mac or investing in a Microsoft product? 

Ryan 

Ryan,

I've never owned any Apple products so can't comment on those, I have used a 2 in 1 windows 10 netbook tablet for portability - good for travel and holidays, it had 64gig EEC memory that was capable of running Photoshop and AffinityPhoto, the processor was good enough to allow  me to use my preferred paint kits, but the smaller screen didn't allow for accurate detail. For this I just saved it and copied the project over to my laptop or desktop PC for completion.

new to the forums myself and was about ask the same question  about repainting. good to see the top8c already started.

an IT guy i work with said the exact same words about gimp. "good as Paint Shop but free" so i will be using that program. will be starting with AI as i want to bring defunct airlines "back to life" as Kamunra would say. i use mainly Aardvark, Fruit Stand, Alpha India models. still using FS9 and those models have never failed me.

 

only question i have that was not asked is Where do get the liveries from? just go to airliners. net or is there a place you can go to copy and paste?